﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Looking for someone to blame is rarely a good idea. But sometimes it can make you feel a whole lot better. So I make no apology for asking who is to blame for Brexit. Even if it is only to get rid of some of the angst that comes along with listening to all those smug far right fanatics telling us we must now all unite behind their agenda.The obvious target for blame is David Cameron with his pathetic approach of slagging off the EU for five and a half years in order to placate the far right of his party and then trying to explain in 6 months how damaging it would be to leave. But if we want to look a bit further then personally I might be tempted to start the blame game with Angela Merkel. She did two things that tipped the vote in the UK. One was actually a very decent and sensible thing to do and very much in the long term interests of Germany and the rest of Europe. She chose not to shut out the Syrian refugees but to welcome them. That made huge inroads into Germany's massive demographic time bomb and was therefore a very wise long term investment in her country's future. It was also the right moral choice. Unfortunately it resulted in paranoia being whipped up in the UK as Brexiteers convinced large numbers of normally sensible people that we were about to be swamped by an invasion of terrorists rather than prevent little children's bodies from being washed up on the shore. I cannot remotely blame Merkel for that.But it is right and proper to blame Merkel for the economic stagnation and the youth unemployment across Europe that mainly resulted from her narrow minded insistence on austerity politics. Does anyone seriously think the UK could have been talked so easily into leaving the EU if Europe was doing well economically? The best argument for Leave campaigners was 40% youth unemployment in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Merkel chose to respond to an economic downturn not by launching a major investment programme in public works but by forcing countries that were going through a deep recession to accept a full scale depression. Austerity wasn't an economic necessity. It was a political choice. Before the bankers messed up Greece had debts that were perfectly possible to handle. After Merkel insisted on contracting their economy they were impossible to do so. Anyone looking at the way Germany was using EU institutions to bully sovereign countries into poverty could hardly be blamed for thinking the UK would be better off well away for that kind of external control.The next contender for the blame game has to be Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party more widely. You cannot oppose the dangerous lurch to the right that Brexit has created by saying ...... well that's precisely the problem. Exactly what did Labour say? Where was the clear steer to its voters that this was a disaster for workers' rights, that it put jobs at risk for a fantasy of Empire 2.0, and that the EU had done fantastic work in preventing European war? Where was any mention of the environmental challenge we collectively face and the need for coherent Europe wide action? Where was the simple explanation of the value of the single market and the argument that Germany was already trading very nicely with the rest of the world in manufacturing so our failure to do so equally successfully was nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with failure to invest enough in the next phases of technology?Individuals from Labour did say such things. The leadership utterly failed to do so sufficiently clearly. It never placed itself at the head of progressive forces and made sure the message got across. Instead it dithered and sounded like it wasn't entirely sure whether a 'left' wing exit might be a good thing. No such exit was on offer as we can now see all too clearly. Why couldn't the Labour party have seen that in advance? Once the referendum vote happened why did it dither so badly over insisting the terms of the deal came back to Parliament? Why is it still struggling to demand clarity about what May intends to do next? Labour is facing the most amazing opportunity any opposition party ever had. All it needs to do is to ask often and loudly for details on what UK policy is going to be on almost any issue you care to name post Brexit. The answers are almost certain to be ones that the public doesn't like the sound of. The answers are highly likely to split the Conservatives down the middle. No answer is going to sound increasingly like evasion.Does even the strongest Labour supporter think that this opportunity has been seized and used well so far? Promises are now being made that the proper fight-back is about to begin. Too little, too late, too unconvincing. Labour has failed us and as someone who wanted Corbyn to succeed I have to say that I think he carries a substantial chunk of the blame for this.My third candidates for blame are the Liberal Democrats. This probably sounds deeply bizarre and unfair as they are currently running a very good campaign against Brexit that I wholeheartedly support. They deserve to do well for offering an option for the 48% of voters who wanted to remain in the EU. Unfortunately it was the Lib Dems' choices in the run up to the referendum that got us into this mess in the first place. As a mathematical fact the reason we have a Conservative government that led us into Brexit is not that Labour lost votes in the last election - it didn't, it increased its share. The reason we have a Conservative government is that the Lib Dem vote utterly collapsed. The Conservatives won their majority by taking seats from the Lib Dems not by taking them from Labour. That happened because people wanted to punish the Lib Dems for the quickest betrayal of a firm commitment that any party has made in my lifetime. Voters refused to turn out for a party that promised to cut tuition fees and then increased them from £3,000 to £9,000. It is possible that voters are now prepared to forgive and forget and the Lib Dems might do very well in Remain constituencies down south at the next election. It is possible that this will win them a lot of seats next time round and deny May her majority. Unfortunately it is likely that even if that happens it will be too late in the day to save us from the consequences of their betrayal in 2010.Yet my real candidate for blame isn't any political party or political leader. It is all of us in the Remain camp. The campaign we ran was pathetic. It consisted mainly of wild threats being issued by establishment figures that people didn't trust. Not enough ordinary Remain folk spoke up before the vote to enough people who disagreed with us. Many grandparents proudly went and voted for Brexit to protect their offspring and then were shocked to discover their grandchildren were really cross with their elderly relatives for messing up their future. The generations didn't talk enough about it before the event. Worse still, many of us have spent hours sending each other twitter messages or even going on demonstrations without bothering to do enough of the hard work of arguing it out with those who disagree with us.You cannot change the country's opinion if you only talk to those who already agree with you. I would like to see us Remainers getting a lot better at asking simple difficult questions and refusing to accept the naive answers we are being offered. I think there is a big opportunity to change public opinion. We need to demand again and again to hear the reality of what is being proposed and ask people whether the answers are remotely realistic and whether this was really what people expected if they voted leave. There are of course plenty of wild swivel eyed people out there who have got themselves convinced that Brexit really is the answer to all our problems. There are a lot more people who voted Brexit because they preferred wild unsubstantiated hopes to wild unsubstantiated threats. On balance, reluctantly, knowing that they had inadequate information the majority of people put their cross against leave in the hope that it would all turn out OK.We have less than two years to persuade that group of people that what they are being offered is nothing remotely like what they were promised and that they must be offered the chance to vote on the real deal not the promises and threats. Either in a General Election before we leave or in a second referendum on the facts not the wild assertions.If we Remainers can contribute anything to achieving that then it may not be too late to avoid taking our own share of the blame.

Technology doesn't entirely drive politics and economics but it does have a huge influence over it. The technology of mass communications is no exception.Political parties first emerged in the age of the printing press and near universal literacy. You needed a mass organisation behind you if you were going to stand any chance of getting your message across to enough people to get elected. So the only way to reach power was to use the mechanism of an established major political party or to spend decades of hard work at the grass roots building another. It took Labour a long time to become a serious contender.Then we had the technology of the radio in which families could sit together in a living room and hear the messages that the official broadcasting organisation decided that you should hear. If the government happened to think that uplifting messages were what you needed then that's what you got. If Adolph Hitler became Chancellor then night after night some considerably more poisonous nonsense was driven into the entire nation's brain with consequences we know all too well. Joseph Stalin used the media in very similar ways. The state could control the airways in an entire nation and did so to dreadful effect.Initially the world of television wasn't so very different in its impact. But multi channel communication and competition for viewers gave us a very different situation. For good and ill. Instead of powerful states controlling what we heard a few very rich owners of multi-media outlets could manipulate the messages at ease. All a wealthy owner needed to do was to provide popular entertainment and that person could broadcast whatever news messages they liked to a passive audience.If you were a politician then you had to live with that reality. If you chose to face down Rupert Murdoch then you were going to lose a lot of votes and have to fight off some very unpleasant reporting about what you were up to. The result was a set of politicians who thought that the way to get into power was to study the opinion polls and try and put their views over as a controlled message that was most likely to appeal to the middle of the road viewer. And of course the owner of the station.That is what the last generation of politicians were best at doing. People like Blair didn't just copy what everyone else was saying. They scientifically tested how to use a relatively narrow range of mass media outlets to drip feed the messages that they wanted to get across most effectively. We lived in an age of machine politicians who needed a mass organisation and a great deal of money to get heard.Things are different now. We are moving away from the age of media that you sat and watched to technology that allows the individual to make thousands of decisions about not only what they want to watch but also what they want to pass on to others or comment on. To put this simply I still sit and watch TV news. My son never does. He only ever consumes news via social media. In fact that statement is a lie. Very few people using social media consume their news. They interact with it.This can have some very dangerous consequences. It means that all sorts of unpleasant minority views can be disseminated without any serious filter on what is transmitted. If you want to pass on horrible extremist religious nonsense that is produced in Saudi Arabia then it is very hard to stop you. The same is true if you are a nasty racist or a child porn addict.It also has some potentially very helpful consequences. Ordinary people can spread opinions that they approve of very rapidly and have a huge influence. We are more likely to believe what we see posted from a friend than we are to believe what we hear on the TV news. Those multiple uncontrollable sources of opinion get stronger by the day and this places a great deal of power back in the hands of the population.What we do with that power is crucial. We can, if we choose, decide to listen only to the voices of those who think like we do and send each other messages that re-enforce and exaggerate the views of that collective. That is what has driven the rise of extremist views. Trumps supporters didn't need to worry about whether their version of reality was scientific or historical truth. They only needed to worry about whether it was popular and how many followers it generated. A social media rant proves attractive when it is persuasive not when it is carefully and accurate.All of this loosens and weakens the power of traditional political parties. It points to a world where views are increasingly starting to fragment and new movements can emerge and fall away very rapidly.For those of us who are interested in creating a more positive future I think this places a number of significant obligations upon us. The most important is to make an active effort to try and seek out sites that are disseminating information and facts that are reliable and to redouble our efforts to distinguish fact from opinion. A bizarre view, you might think, from someone writing an opinion piece but I have always thought that opinion has to be built on a knowledge of and respect for the facts. The alt right doesn't have access to alternative facts. Instead it provides easy access to ill informed and incorrect ones. The alt left should avoid falling into the same trap. If only because false facts have a nasty habit of being uncovered as lies and in the long run that is a very effective way of losing a lot of trust.The second obligation is, I believe, to redouble our efforts to contribute healthy views and interesting debate to the mix. I have been arguing here that we are moving away from the age of one or two prime sources of information and of mass political parties or very rich media magnates who could exert effective control over what most people thought. There is now much more chance for multiple voices to be heard and for many different experiences to be communicated.To use this technology well we are going to have to get used to facing down those who have some very nasty and unpleasant views. We do so most effectively not by ignoring those views and leaving them to get stronger in their own ghettos. We have to be prepared to challenge them and show the evidence that they are wrong. We also do so most effectively when we embrace the opportunity to listen to and share willingly the wealth of much more constructive and optimistic views that come from decent caring individuals of a wide range of backgrounds.Used well social media could liberate us from control and allow us to build very rapidly some positive alternative views about how we wish to live our lives. Used badly it becomes a tool used to egg on extremists to divide us into ever smaller tribes. The tribe that likes living collaboratively and is interested in testing out and discovering reality in all its glorious variety is going to need to work hard to win out.

In order to make it more widely available the following is the original text of a local election leaflet I've been distributing in the Craven area. Though some of the issues are very local I think the relevance is pretty widespread as the issues are pretty typical of what is happening up and down the country. Judge for yourself:

Our community is under attack. We are used to living in a beautiful part of the world in a very friendly place where if you work hard you can make a good living and if something goes wrong then there is a strong safety net there to look after you.Not any more. In virtually every area of our lives the things we value are at risk. Our district council has been so slow in producing a local housing plan and so weak in its dealings with developers that we are seeing large areas of green fields built over with housing estates. All the evidence shows that there is a need amongst local people for more small properties so that first time buyers can get started and older people can live in safely adapted accommodation. That is not what is being built. A huge housing estate is being put onto green land between Skipton and Carleton at the risk of submerging the village into the town. But it won't meet local need. It will provide yet more three and four bedroom executive homes and a huge problem with traffic congestion. There is plenty of brownfield land to build enough small homes for local people in place like the Cononley Mill. Yet there the developer is being allowed to get away with building four and five bedroom homes and gobbling up the green parts of the site to do it. These development problems are not down to lack of money. Nationally £5 billion is being given by government to the same developers who are causing our problems. The problem is down to the political will to let councils start building homes for need.North Yorkshire County Council is also letting us down badly. Last year it became the first council in the country to volunteer to accept fracking for gas in Rydale. This may sound safely far enough away. But it is not. Now that the principle has been established that North Yorkshire has allowed one drill site there is a high risk that others will follow. Nationally licences have been issued to investigate the potential of fracking the Forest of Bowland. The government has also permitted fracking to take place beneath the Dales National Park provided it starts outside. Deep beneath your feet water and chemicals will be released under pressure to force gas up to the surface. No one knows exactly where the polluted water that results will end up. We do know that politicians down south have suggested that it is OK to frack up north because we are already living amongst slag heaps.The same cavalier attitude towards the neglect and decline of services we value in the north is evident again and again in decisions made by national politicians. Our health service is to be re-organised yet again but patients groups were not allowed to even see the plans until they were almost finalised. Our education service is to be re-organised yet again. More schools are to be built for those who wish to see their children educated in religiously separated ways. At a time when we need more community integration the government are spending money on segregation. Then they are telling us that there isn't enough money to provide the places at local primary schools that local people need. Parents are forced to drive their children miles to their second or third choice school separating them from their friends. North Yorkshire County Council used to be able to plan school provision. They can't do this properly anymore because so many local schools are academies that operate without any local democratic control over their governance.Local transport is also in a mess. Not because of lack of money but because of bad decisions. Money is going into vanity schemes like electrification of the West Coast line. Meanwhile the local bus service has been cut so often that the service has become almost unusable and we are still waiting for small scale sensible investments like the Skipton to Colne rail line to open up job opportunities in Manchester for local people. The government has talked a great deal about the Northern Powerhouse. It hasn't put any real money into it. In fact the reverse. Investment per head on transport infrastructure is almost 3 times as high in London as in the north. In other words our taxes have gone on yet another Crossrail link for London whilst the north is faced with a jumble of poorly connected lines run by different private companies operating a mysterious pricing system. A coherent modern northern over-ground is what is needed to help economically revive cities and communities in which millions of us live.Again and again we have been told that our problem as a country is either lack of money or something to do with immigration when the real difficulty has been bad choices by politicians. £375 billion pounds of money was spent by the Bank of England on quantitative easing for the banks. Meanwhile we were told that local councils had to cut back on care for the elderly so there is a shortage of places to get properly looked after when you are old. After the Brexit vote a further £70 billion of quantitative easing money is being pumped out by the Bank of England. None of it will go on investing in modernising British industry to be ready for the new green technologies which will dominate the next decades. None of it will go on insulating homes so that we can cut down on the cost of our energy bills, stop sending money on buying oil from horrible regimes like Saudi Arabia or Putin's Russia. Perfectly good money will once again be frittered away on shoring up dodgy financial systems whilst food banks proliferate.If any of this remotely irritates you as much as it irritates us then there is something you can do about it. Most people don't bother to vote in local elections because local councils have lost so much money that they can seem to have no impact on our lives. Actually they matter. We have the chance to send a message in local government elections that we have had enough.If you don't want fracking - vote GreenIf you don't want executive housing covering our countryside - vote GreenIf you want money invested in change - vote GreenIf you think the north is every bit as important as London - vote Green

Infiltration by extremists is a real problem for a political party. So the Conservatives should have got a grip on it before it was too late. After all most of their voters are still under the illusion that they are putting their cross against the name of people who think the best way to look after the country's interests is to create a strong business climate. They would be in for a very nasty surprise if they fully realised quite how ideologically obsessed the far right that has taken over the party has become.The problem with those who are convinced that they have the one true ideology is that they tend to do very stupid things because they believe their own propaganda. The tea party radicals who are now in government genuinely believe that everything is going to be very much better once the UK is free from all that Brussels bureaucracy. That blinds them completely to any concept that there might be serious down sides to consider. As a consequence they are failing totally to prepare for those down sides.I happen to believe that on balance remaining in the EU is positive for the UK. That shouldn't mean I am daft enough to think every last thing that organisation does is sensible or necessary. I still think the right approach is to say that "Another Europe is possible" and to do the serious work necessary to create it.Those who happen to believe that on balance we should leave the EU and prepare sensibly for that are now being pushed aside by ideologues who have convinced themselves that leaving the EU is THE ANSWER TO OUR PROBLEMS. It isn't of course. There never is a simple answer to our problems.Incredibly wild naive optimists are now in government. You would expect a serious politician to prepare for a brave new future by rapidly articulating the exact policies that they intend to put in place once we are out of the EU. That just isn't happening. Or at least not remotely in the depths of detail or in the timescales that are necessary.Now is the time for everyone to be debating furiously what our policy should be on agriculture. Yet the government has produced nothing. Now is also the time for us to look in great depth at our Industrial Strategy. We have instead a wishy washy White Paper full of pious hopes, little useful detail, tired recycled policies and a tiny amount of money. We have two years left to work out our systems to deal with Brexit on everything from passport controls to custom posts to software redesigns of whole strings of policy areas. Where is the sign that the ideologues even realise that these jobs need doing?The British Government isn't good at designing new computer systems. Two years of design and testing would be something of a record for pulling off one relatively minor project on time and on budget. The work doesn't seem to have even begun on thinking about what we might need to commission to deal with EU exit and none of the impractical ideologues who keep telling us what a wonderful opportunity lies before us seems remotely bothered.Anyone who asks a practical question about Brexit is derided as a moaner. We are told instead that we are lacking confidence in our own bright future. That is not the way most sensible business people I know and have worked with go about doing things. Practical people list all the possible dangers and then set about limiting and controlling them whilst thinking about maximising the opportunities. Instead of a businesslike approach our government seems to consist of people who think it will all turn out OK because that is what they told each other would happen in their last twitter exchange.The political fanatics in the Conservative party have infiltrated it much more comprehensively and completely than Momentum could even dream of doing with the Labour Party. And they are every bit as dangerous as the most deluded Trotskyist revolutionary.This is not simply a mishap. It is a tendency that is being displayed by more and more political parties. For a reason. Ordinary people living busy lives rarely wish to spend their evenings working their way through the tedious agendas of the political parties. It takes an unusual degree of fanaticism to join a party and turn up to its meetings. This means that the members of the parties rarely fully reflect the people who might be inclined to vote for them. Those who turn up to the meetings are even further out of step.Political activists are usually what I call political hobbyists. We - and I include myself in this number - by definition are not typical. We have a fascination with politics and a set of beliefs that we are committed to with passion. That can be helpful. It can also be very dangerous. It takes a conviction that you are right to effect positive change. Unfortunately it also takes a conviction that you are right to send people off to gulags and gas chambers. And to do a lot of other very nasty things that are less fatal like cutting off disability benefits from people who are too sick to get to their assessment interview.That is one of the prime reasons ordinary people are suspicious of politicians. The problem is not that many politicians are utterly corrupt and just in it to make money. That exists but it is a relatively small problem. The real problem is that most politicians are in it because they are absolutely sure they are right and that they are helping people by forcing through their latest obsession.I think we all need to take a step back and a deep breath and to spend a lot more time speaking with people who disagree with us. Especially practical people who know something about running a business or delivering a service. Would the NHS be in its current mess if it hadn't been re-organised quite so often by politicians? Does education really need to be so politicised? Who really knows how to run things - the political obsessive or the person who has actual done the job?Naturally I think the party I support has more of the right answers than the other parties. But that doesn't mean I also think they have got plenty of things wrong.Greens are right about the scale of the environmental crisis and the radical nature of the way we have to rethink our economic policy to equip ourselves for the future. We were right about the choices that should have been at the start of the long drawn out period of austerity and that it was the best time to invest in the future not the best time to punish the poor for a financial crash. We were right about the Iraq war. And we are right to say that there are no blank cheques for Brexit and we the public should be given the chance to vote again once we see the real deal instead of voting on wild promises versus wild threats.We are also quite capable of listening too much to our own political hobbyists and sounding like we want to be a party of protest. Like all parties the Green Party needs to work hard to keep its connection with ordinary voters strong and its connection with political enthusiasts under control.After all we wouldn't want to end up as silly and extreme as the people who are currently running our government! Would we now!

Poor old Theresa May. This governing business was all looking so easy. Now all of a sudden it is starting to look like it might just be a touch harder than she thought.Turns out that anytime her government actually decides anything then one or other faction of her party gets quite cross. Who would have thought it?The row over National Insurance contributions is a very simple case in point. May appointed Hammond in the vain hope that having someone half way sensible in the Chancellor's role might mitigate some of the worst excesses of the far right that now dominates her cabinet. So he proceeded to try and deliver what he thought was a safe pair of hands budget.Leave aside for a moment the fact that the budget completely ignored the big long term problems we all face. The environment, the massive UK balance of payments problem and the build up of yet another uncontrolled financial bubble didn't feature. Instead Hammond did a bit of modest tinkering to tidy up an anomaly that leaves self employed people paying a lot less National Insurance than employed people and provides a huge incentive to create artificially self employed jobs.The result was a storm of protest over how hard this was on White Van Man and the fastest climb down in budget history. Hammond's position now looks deeply insecure. More important May looks like a lady who is quite keen on turning. Providing she can put the blame on someone else for a move she must have known about in advance.Emboldened by one victory her back benchers are now gearing up for another fight. They have just discovered that if you cut education spending in real terms for long enough then schools eventually end up short of money. School Head Teachers from up and down the country are very politely but firmly explaining to their local MP exactly how deeply their income will drop next year and exactly what the consequences will be.Way back in the dim and distant past when Osborne was in charge of UK finances - instead of building up his own - those Conservative back benchers cheered to the rafters when he told them he was making tough choices but the worst of the austerity would really begin to bite safely after the 2015 General Election. Now those same cheering back benchers are starting to realise that they will have to explain to the Mums and Dads who voted for them why their local primary school is losing two teachers. That is the kind of cut that parents notice as their child ends up taught in huge classes alongside a lot of kids of very different ages with different needs and comes home unhappy.What makes all this worse is that the loss of two teachers is the average impact on a primary school. Along with the overall cut in school funding and increased bills for national insurance and pension contributions, schools are also facing the impact of a new "fairer" funding system. When a Conservative talks about funding being "fairer" it is a good idea to ask the simple question: "fairer for who?" The answer is very simple. The impact on cuts in safe Tory seats in Shire Counties is lessened. The impact on inner city schools is even worse than the average. No wonder Conservatives in marginal seats are getting a touch nervous. Defending education cuts of this size is very difficult. So is defending closure of local hospitals or medical centres as part of yet another top down re-organisation of NHS. That is now under way despite being the exact opposite of what Cameron promised at the 2010 election.Many people voted Conservative at the last election because they thought in their heart of hearts that the worst period of austerity would now be over and they might as well let the Conservatives finish the job. That isn't what the average person is experiencing and certainly not what the typical young person faces. 9 years since the crash they are still waiting for their real incomes to return to the same level, still struggling to buy a decent home and still seeing services that they need getting steadily worse.It isn't going to get better any time soon. In actuality the worst of the cuts were timed to impact over the next two years. Public service organisations have cut their staff's real incomes for 9 years and asked them to deliver a better service with less money per head across the whole of those 9 years. After 9 years of real term funding reductions the majority of public services are not in a position to cope with even larger cuts. That is exactly what they are now about to experience.Then there is the small matter of the economic and policy uncertainty of Brexit. It could all go wonderfully smoothly and everyone could agree in the nicest possible way to a good deal and implement it in a spirit of collaboration and harmony. And pigs could fly. Provided of course that they are genetically modified battery farmed pigs coming from America under trade deals overseen by un-elected corporate lawyers. It could also be that the damage Brexit will do to the economy starts to become more and more obvious and the cock ups and bitter disputes increase by the day.The critical question now is who gets the blame for all this. May has been cut a lot of slack by the electorate. She is riding high in the opinion polls because she emerged from the post referendum chaos as one of the few politicians who kept her head and looked like she might actually be able to run the country. Yet the Institute of Fiscal Studies has told us that real wages for the average person are not going to be any higher until fifteen years after the crash. Delivering the worst improvement in standards of living since the war isn't a great way to win hearts and minds.Brexit is hard enough to handle. Add in a battle between a fantasy far right and the old core of the party that believed they joined to secure sensible economic policies and life looks harder. Then consider an electorate that has had no wage increase for fifteen years. Throw into the mix increasingly visible crises in the public services that people value. Then add the risk of a breakup of the United Kingdom as first Scotland and then Northern Ireland stares hard at the reality of an exit that they didn't vote for.Life for May is about to get very hard indeed. I would offer her my deepest sympathy. But she lost that when she switched from carefully explaining to us how damaging it would be to leave the EU to informing us that we had to have a form of Brexit that is so hard no one dared tell voters about it during the referendum.

​When it comes to tactics you have to admire Nicola Sturgeon. On the day when Theresa May was expecting to dominate headlines with the news that Parliament had given her unprecedented Presidential powers to negotiate away British rights she suddenly had the rug pulled out from under her feet. By the SNP announcing they wanted a meaningful vote even if no one else in the UK got one.All of which led me to speculate on where I stand on Scottish Nationalism. After all one of the reasons why I campaigned to remain the EU is that I believe we have a global economy and have to find ways of collaborating together to manage that global economy. To me that means moving beyond separate nation states and having a sensible degree of decision making at a European level. With the necessary institutions to ensure that important collective decisions are overseen by democratically elected MEPs. Indeed I am utterly convinced that we need to go much further and try to establish effective and democratic worldwide government mechanisms. You can't have a global economy and a global ecology without world government. Or rather you can and we do but what you get is a chaotic global economy that lurches from boom to bust accompanied by serious ecological instability.Given how strongly internationalist this view sounds it may seem bizarre to some that I also strongly believe in localism. It seems to me that the more it is necessary to make some decisions at a national, European or world level the more important it becomes for local communities to have a genuine opportunity to decide on their own affairs. Whenever it is not absolutely necessary to make a decision at a higher level I think decision making should take place at the local level. At lot more decisions can and should be local.Community is a really important asset. To his credit David Cameron spoke often about this in his early days as Prime Minister when he was very keen on the Big Society. To his shame what he actually did was to take power and money away from local government and to devastate the voluntary sector by inflicting more austerity on them than anyone else. Then he told local communities that they must allow developers to build on the Green Belt because he wrongly believed that was the only way to meet housing targets.So on one level I tend to think Sturgeon has got it right. Scotland should be taking control of its own affairs. Within a network of formal collaboration between independent nations. I have a lot of sympathy for the view that the way for Scotland to preserve its strong sense of community and identity is to get out of the United Kingdom. There is certainly a strong case for saying that if their nation is to be forced out of the EU despite voting solidly in favour of remaining in it then, at the very least, they are entitled to vote again on whether they want this to happen. Before it happens. I also have a lot of sympathy with the argument that if you have got a competent left leaning Scottish government and an incompetent far right British government then the time may have come for a parting of the ways.On another level I am not so sure. All the arguments about the dangers of Britain leaving the EU apply equally even more strongly if Scotland leaves the UK. Access to a single market. Free movement of labour within sensible limits. An absence of tariffs and border controls. Stronger together. All of these things matter. It is simply not in the interests of the vast majority of people in Scotland to have a firm border between their country and the rest of the UK. It is simply not possible to have separate countries with separate tariffs and not have hard borders. As the UK government is going to discover in Northern Ireland at severe costs. It is possible for a national separation to result in serious long term damage to an economy that outweighs the advantages of quicker local decision making.At the moment virtually everyone is trying hard to be inconsistent about Scottish independence and the EU. The right keep telling us how important it is for nations to be proudly independent and to get away from remote government by unelected politicians. Until they hear that said by someone from Scotland when they immediately start telling us how important it is for us to all stay together inside a single market. The degree of little England contempt that they display goes way beyond any of the arrogant excesses coming out of Brussels that they furiously opposed. Meanwhile large numbers of Remainers are arguing that Scotland should cut their losses and get out of the UK. For them it is vital that we all stay together. Unless we are Scottish and English.My view is that the EU is not such a magnificent institution that it is worth Scotland separating itself off from the UK in order to remain part of it. We need heavy reform of the EU to make it more democratic, to improve its common agricultural policy and to recognise the diversity that exists within its constituent parts. It makes a lot of sense for Europe to move forward to and allow Europe wide democratic decision making about those things that really do need to be in common across the whole of a trading block. It makes a lot more sense to allow EU member states to move at different speeds and adopt different approaches on as many things as possible. Put another way we need the ability to pass European wide laws about what safety standards a car needs to meet before it can be sold in fair competition but we do not need European wide laws about whether a woman is allowed to wear a headscarf at work.In the referendum the Green Party campaigned on the slogan that "Another Europe is Possible". That was a very sensible approach that didn't try to threaten people and to defend the bureaucratic practices of Brussels but instead focused on the importance of trying to achieve positive things together. What we need now is a similar approach. We should be arguing that "Another UK is Possible". Let Scotland have its vote. But let's work together to create the kind of UK that people of Scotland will want to stay in.I leave it to readers' judgement as to whether Theresa May is capable of doing that and of the damage that will be done to the UK if we lose both our membership of the EU and the membership of Scotland in the UK. I also leave it to your judgement as to whether telling the people of Scotland that they will not be allowed to vote on their future until they've actually left the EU is more or less likely to result in a vote for exit and the break up of the United Kingdom.

It takes quite a lot to get Head Teachers snorting with derision at the Education Minister who makes all the important decisions about their funding. But Justine Greening managed it at the Head Teachers' Conference this weekend. She gave them the benefit of her firm opinion that grammar schools were there to help the poor succeed. They knew the facts and gave her the benefit of their utter contempt.Turns out that some Head Teachers are actually quite well informed about education. Who would have thought it? Indeed many of them are quite capable of understanding the obvious reality that if you select some children in for an excellent service then you are selecting a lot more children out for a worse one. A secondary modern service that tries to interest children in education who have just been segregated down at 11 and given the message that they are less worthy across the board than some of their former classmates. But Greening didn't care about listening to their expertise or those pesky fact things. She was onto a potential vote winner for her Party and proceeded to lecture them on her favourite theories.Children are complex people. Most of them are good at some things and bad at others. Many of them change rapidly and can suddenly change their interests and improve. Almost every Head Teacher knows about this "spiky profile" of children's abilities and is fully comfortable with selection into ability groups on a subject by subject basis. Almost all subtly adjust the composition of those ability groups at least once a year and move children up or down to make sure they are learning at the pace that best suits them in that particular subject that year. So they are not opposed to grammars because of some blind and stupid resistance to all forms of selection. They are simply opposed to the utterly clumsy method of total segregation on the basis of one test at age 11 because it doesn't work. They are opposed to Grammar schools because they lower overall educational achievement. The evidence has shown it again and again.Grammar schools achieve excellent results and the children in them prosper. Compare grammars with other schools and their results look great. But look at the full cohort in a grammar and secondary modern system and the picture is very different indeed. With a very few proud and noble exceptions secondary modern schools don't achieve excellent results. Take the results for all the children in the areas with segregated testing and compare them with children from equally well off backgrounds where there is a comprehensive system and the comps win.So any balanced and fair person who has studied the educational evidence would not wish to undermine the work of the vast majority of those Heads by taking away the 20% of their cohort that does best on tests at age 11 and then expecting them to take the blame for the near inevitable decline in school results which follows.That is not to suggest that nothing in the education system needs changing. We do need to strip out enormous quantities of un-necessary bureaucracy. We do need to put a greater emphasis on science and technology and prepare children much better for the rapidly changing world of work. We do need to invest to ensure learners encounter modern equipment instead of being trained on clunky technology that was bought decades ago. We do need to let teachers innovate more and be creative. And above all we do need to stop constantly re-organising the service and making it ever more complex to do a relatively simple job.Instead of getting on with doing some of these things or just focusing on running schools rather better well the Conservative Party is wasting time, energy and a lot of money on creating Grammar Schools.We seem to have a Conservative Party that is increasingly determined to create a society where all services are ranked heavily by class. The upper classes can pay for private education and get an excellent service. Slightly less well off parents will be able to see their child go off to a Grammar school or a religious Free School where it will be easy to attract good teachers and performance standards will be high. For the rest an underfunded service in crumbling buildings will offer little chance of acquiring the skills that will be needed in a knowledge economy.Funding for sixth form education has been cut by 12%. Funding for younger students is being redistributed according to a "fairer" funding system. The new system has complex impacts on individual areas but overall it moves money out of inner city areas and into wealthy rural shires. The majority of schools are facing lower funding per student. Education Service Grants of £77 per pupil have been removed. Extra costs have been imposed on schools via the Apprenticeship Levy, National Insurance rises and Pension contribution increases. None have been funded.The main cost in any school is teaching staff. Those teachers are yet again being asked to pay the price of the financial crisis by taking real term pay cuts for the 7th year running. Yet even the 1% increase in the cash they receive prior to inflation is not funded by central government. Head Teachers have been asked every year to fund the rise out of 'efficiency savings'. That usually means larger class sizes and increased workloads.The continued increase in pointless government paperwork and bureaucracy coupled with the declining pay and the constant criticism and politicisation of the service has guaranteed that there is no real improvement in efficiency. Instead experienced and capable teachers are leaving the profession in droves and we have a serious teacher shortage. We also have a desperate shortage of teachers willing to be Heads and a rapid increase in turnover of those doing the job. A country can only be successful if it provides all its citizens with high quality relevant skills and knowledge. Across South East Asia and in many other parts of the world countries are devoting huge resources to making sure that all their children acquire first class skills, know at least two languages and have a real solid foundation of knowledge. They are doing this because they believe that educating all their children will result in a much stronger economic performance - and also because they think it is the morally right thing to do for their future citizens.Britain is cutting the resources available for each child, focusing them on a few elite children and demoralising the profession with a mountain of bureaucracy. Just as high quality universal education is becoming widespread across the planet the Conservative Party are giving up on providing it for the majority of UK citizens.But cheer up. Perhaps it is all part of a plan to turn what is left of the UK into a proud independent nation trading successfully with the rest of the world.

It is now 100 years since the Russian revolution. Or at least the first one. We are still suffering from the intellectual legacy of the second.Underneath the surface of too much radical left thinking is the assumption that the February/March revolution was something of a sham and the real proper revolution only happened in October/November when the Bolsheviks took over. Apparently you can't have a genuine revolution unless it is a proletarian one led people who have studied their Marx.This is of course a grotesque distortion of history. The February revolution wasn't some kind of bourgeois trick. It came more genuinely from below than anything that happened in October. It began when a bunch of women got so angry about what they were being put through that their conversations in a bread queue turned into a riot. It consolidated when those same women were able to persuade the soldiers sent to shoot them down that they were in effect shooting their own mothers. The outcome of all those people refusing to do what they were told was the spontaneous establishment of representative groups of workers and soldiers who appointed their own leadership. Ironically, or rather revealingly, those women in the bread queues didn't get representation other than via their workplace. Nevertheless for a few brief months those soviets were an example of representative democracy at its best.Almost as soon as these highly representative soviets were created political parties tried to get rid of them. Those who had opposed the Tsarist autocracy because of its inefficiency and suppression of freedom and of argumentative talent did so by trying to create a Provisional Government. One of the prime causes of the second revolution is the idiocies that arose from that group of people trying to govern a nation that didn't really accept their legitimacy. People in the towns and cities knew and trusted their soviet representatives - they had no reason to trust an unelected collection of bizarre figureheads. It was therefore no surprise that when the Provisional Government tried to continue to send millions more of the citizens of the Russian empire to their death in a pointless war they quickly lost the last vestiges of their credibility and got overthrown.As far as most Marxists are concerned the entire period between the two revolutions was just a period of waiting until enough of the working class understood where their best interests lay and accepted the wise leadership of the Bolsheviks. Then when the 'glorious' Soviet Union was established anyone on the left who dared to criticise it was dismissed as a splitter, a dangerous liberal, a petty bourgeois element, lacking in class consciousness or just plain disloyal to the workers' cause.Nothing could be further from the truth. From the moment it came to power the Bolshevik party pursued a vision of state socialism that was seriously at odds with the original aspirations of the first revolution and the real interests of ordinary people. Freedom was not a major part of the Bolshevik agenda. Control and guidance by a wise class conscious elite was. The result was that leaders who came to power with some excellent intentions succeeded in putting an end to the war and creating some very useful things like universal state education and health care. They also succeeded in creating a monolithic state dictatorship in which millions got sent to their deaths in the gulags.So though the Russian revolution began with all the spontaneous energy of uncontrolled soviet democracy the Bolsheviks institutionalised their own power as a 'Soviet' state and abolished the reality of popular soviets. As Orwell saw all too clearly the only way to understand state communist politics is not to look at what the leaders claim to be doing but to study their actions instead. Work on controlling and abolishing local workers councils began immediately after the second Russian revolution. Work on institutionalising the soviets and the trade unions was almost as quick. Before long it was the party elite who ruled not the workers.If you listen to most Trotskyists they will tell you that the revolution only descended into a bureaucratic state monolith because the revolution took place during difficult circumstances and there weren't enough class conscious proletarians around. Yet revolutions always take place in difficult circumstances so if that scuppers your hopes then proletarian revolution doesn't make for a very good solution. Even if the authoritarian leader's name is Trotsky instead of Stalin. In Russia an awful lot of proletarians saw very quickly how control was being forced on to them by the party of the bureaucrats and tried hard to fight against it in places like Kronstadt and in waves of strikes and protests. They were put down every bit as violently as the worst Tsarist counter revolutionaries.Even more damaging was the establishment of the Third International. The leaders of the Russian Communist party decided to export their brand of socialism and get an army of radicals across the world to work on their behalf. That organisation is still the source of much of the thinking on the more traditional left. It is what drives the conviction that economic problems are fundamental and all others are somehow secondary. It is what drives the illusion that we can somehow trust authoritarian leaders in other countries so long as they claim to be socialist. It is also what drives the conviction that workers problems are real whereas women's domestic experience, the environment, issues of sexuality and questions of liberty or community are all very well and nice but not really quite as serious or important.Before the Russian revolution the left had authoritarian socialist traditions but it also had very fine and strong libertarian traditions. People like William Morris were the lifeblood of the British left but written off by many Marxists for bothering too much with silly little issues like freedom of artistic expression and the importance of living in harmony with nature. People like Robert Owen were dismissed with an easy sneer for being idealistic. As if trying to implement ideals in practice on a small scale was somehow less worthy than seeking to overthrow a state and institute a Marxist dictatorship.We now need to rid ourselves completely of the sterile Marxist thinking that still dominates so much of the left. We need an alt left. One that believes in liberty every bit as much as it does in equality. One that values genuine democracy. One that thinks every aspect of life is worthy of improvement and see the environment, gender, sexuality, artist expression, and the home as central issues for radicals.When they asked Chou En Lai what he thought of the French revolution 150 years after the event he is said to have replied that it was too early to tell. After 100 years of the experience of state socialist thinking it would be wonderful if we could all decide that it is in fact far too late to form a judgement. The second Russian Revolution failed. Not because of difficult circumstances preventing the perfect application of the one true ideology. It failed because its leaders tried to do the wrong things. They thought they had the perfect answers because of the revealed scientific truth of Marxism. Instead they created an astonishingly authoritarian government.The left will never fully recover from the damage of that until it gets over the intellectual legacy. It is time for socialism to go back to its roots and discover the importance of being every bit as enthusiastic about liberty and community as it is about equality. Authoritarian socialism had its day and failed. It is time for a libertarian left - an alt left - to step up to the task of building a popular movement that genuinely helps ordinary people. Instead of party apparatchiks.

​Complacency is never an attractive characteristic. Especially when you have nothing much to be complacent about. Philip Hammond took it to new levels in his budget.He began by reminding us that it was nearly ten years since the economic crash and we were still suffering the after effects. Yet he did nothing to prevent another one. Moreover he offered no explanation of why it had occurred. Because he doesn't have one.Then he told us that the deficit wasn't fixed. Indeed it wasn't going to be fixed until 22-23 which is five years from now. Despite all the promises that austerity would fix the black hole it is still with us. The only thing that is different is that the Bank of England has been printing free money for almost ten years, interest rates have been negative in real terms for almost as long, and all that easy money has not been used for investment but for a surge in credit and a boom in asset values.As many of us predicted if you print money and boost the economy during a crisis you limit the scale of it and actually limit the deficit. So Hammond was able to proudly tell us that the deficit was coming down. What he didn't tell us what that it was the Bank of England that had done this. Or that the Bank of England has chosen to fuel a dangerous credit bubble in order to offset the governments excessive drive for punishment austerity. In other words those who did nothing to create the crash are still struggling whilst those whose reckless credit gambles cause the problem in the first place have been supplied with over £400 billion of free money.When it comes to supporting business a stable operating environment and secure markets are central. Not a word was said about the extreme risks of the Brexit gamble for business. We got a very welcome attempt to ameliorate the worst effects of an over large one year swings in business rates. Something Caroline Lucas of the Green Party lobbied hard for. But no attempt was made to even the playing field by taxing offshore companies properly and making sure business isn't lost to tax avoiding competitors. So businesses on the high street are left facing severe competition from online retailers who don't pay remotely the same level of rates on their turnover. Export businesses are left with platitudes about making the UK great again whilst we head for tariff barriers with our main market. All businesses are left with the worry of how long it will be before the explosion in credit spending that has propped up the economy bursts and what will happen when the next crash comes.In the public sector what was offered was even more complacent. If you reduce real terms funding per head for close on a decade whilst customers get older and more challenging it is hard to run a service. Technology doesn't cut costs in health, education, prison services or care. It simply makes the job more sophisticated and expensive. So staff in schools, hospitals, prisons, police and local government have had to take the pressure of extra workloads and cuts in real incomes. The result is a huge crisis in staffing, and falls in service levels.In this context Hammond's answer to the rise in A&E waiting lists was almost comical. He won't provide hospitals or GPs with any new money to actually treat people but he will offer £100 million for better triage in the hope that it might prove possible to reduce waiting times by sending home quickly those who don't really need much help. The patient gets a sticking plaster and so does the hospital service!Hammond's answers to the problem of running costs reeked of complacency and cheap politics. He announced capital funding for new free schools so we can segregate more of our children into religious ghettos and subject them to the crudest method of child selection out. Instead of forming subtle and regularly changing ability groups within a school and allowing all children in the community to blossom at the thing they are good at he has chosen to inform 90% of our children that they are overall failures at the age of 11. Hardly the way to encourage aspiration.To give him his credit he did finally get round to putting some serious money into ensuring that our technical colleges offer students the opportunity to study for longer in the week in order to reach higher standards. The first Chancellor to do anything serious for this sector in decades. It remains to be seen whether doing this by forcing everyone with an interest in technical education to study for one of 15 T levels will prove as stupid a waste of time as Ed Balls attempts to do almost exactly the same thing when he was Education Secretary and later Chancellor. Committees with industry 'representatives' rarely design very good qualifications and it takes decades for parents, children, employers and universities to value a new one. Closing all the old qualifications and betting the house on your own pet project may not be the best way to promote technical education.Nevertheless we must be thankful for small mercies on technical education and also thankful for some small recognition of the scale of the care crisis. Because everywhere else his approach was to ignore the problem, hope it will go away, score cheap political points about how badly Labour did the job and kick the can a bit further down the road.No wonder we have a country full of people who are deeply cynical of politicians. We all know it is difficult to balance budgets. We all know you can't spend money on everything. We all know Chancellors can't fix every problem overnight. Yet instead of admitting the scale of the challenges we face we got told the oldest politicians lie in the book. It is all the fault of the last lot and under my wise leadership it is all getting better.Complacency in the extreme. It reminded me of listening to Gordon Brown proudly telling us that he had put an end to boom and bust. Just before we were hit by the biggest bust the global economy has ever known. It could all end even more badly.Anyone confident that the economy has the resilience to cope with the next crash?

One of the most worrying aspects of the recent US election was the fact that a significant number of Americans voted for Obama twice and then switched to Trump. The bulk of Trump's support came from white middle class voters and the bulk of the working class voted against him. Yet enough people switched away from the Democrats to make all the difference. This takes some explaining.On the face of it the two Presidents have desperately little in common. The one put in years of steady determined work to turn the economy round from the depths of the 2008 crash whilst widening health care opportunities for the poor and doing some things about the environmental crisis. The other seems to favour a reckless rush for growth driven by tax cuts and is determined to make welfare, health care and environmental programmes as small as possible. Obama and Michele were the essence of Presidential dignity. The far right keeps desperately trying to spot signs that the Trumps are gaining some semblance of the same attributes - and then failing to explain the latest bout of bad behaviour. Donald Trump has all the deep insecurity of a man who was denied parental affection as a child - he is petulant, self obsessed, egotistical, untruthful, accusatory, and fearful that others are out to get him. Obama has been through 8 years of exceptionally hard challenges and never once shown the least sign of emotional insecurity or lack of maturity.They do, however, have one thing in common. Or at least their campaigns did. They both offered a message of hope. Obama campaigned on high poetry telling millions that "Yes we can!". He made it sound very simple to deliver complex solutions and got the votes he needed on the back of that message of hope for a rapid transformation. Trump listened and learned. He took that idea and used it more cynically. He also offered hope of a quick and easy solution. He was going to make America great again by building a wall, making the Mexican's pay and putting America first.Across the world far right politicians are adopting the same approach. Never mind the messy complexities of the real world. Just tell folks that you can sort everything out with one quick bound. Leave the EU and we'll magically enter a golden age. Keep out all those pesky foreigners and the good times will come back. Get rid of those welfare scroungers and all those grinding years of austerity will be over in a flash.It matters little that these are all false and sterile solutions to some very challenging problems. What matters is that voters are able to believe that their lives will get better if they just dare to hope. It is a powerful message and one that generates some very aggressive and enthusiastic followers. How dare the rest of us get in the way of their brave dreams with our pesky nit picking realities?Anyone wishing to fight back against this needs to think hard about the best strategy. One approach is to keep plugging away on exposing the contradictions between the rhetoric of Trump and his kind and the reality of their delivery. We live in a genuine global economy and you can't solve global problems by building walls around the US, the UK, England, one town, or one home. One nation narrow nationalism is very psychologically comfortable for some but it never works well in the long run. There is a huge gap between what we are being promised and what is being delivered. We are told we are entering a new golden era. Yet the health service is falling apart, the care service is a mess, schools are broke, and young people are facing lower living standards than their parents.Exposing the flaws in the logic of the right is well worth doing but it only takes you so far. The emotional battle also has to be fought. Just ask Obama. He transformed the economy from losing over 400,000 jobs a month, saved the US car industry, rescued the financial system from collapse and delivered some of the best economic data Americans had seen in years. And his party got dumped out of office in both Houses at the same time as losing the Presidency. Because Clinton offered not enough hope.Hope is what is needed. For me that means changing the nature of the message about almost all areas of our activity. I don't like constantly asking people to oppose cuts and continually sounding like we are desperately trying to fend off change.I want to be part of a movement that embraces positive change. I want to talk about giving people the opportunity to take advantage of the wonderful new advances in health care by investing in the future of the service. I believe in investing in the future technology of low energy industry and a knowledge economy. I want to live to the full in a global society and build links not walls. I like giving people opportunities by providing high quality relevant education for all instead of separating the classes off into different educational ghettos and then blaming the underclass for failing. I prefer freedom to constraints and consider myself a libertarian. I want everyone to contribute to society's success to the best of their abilities. I want to build communities and to strengthen society so I believe in looking after those who need support.We have the choice to talk about defending the welfare state or creating opportunity. Done well it is the same thing. We can also choose to talk about stopping climate change or moving forward out of an era of fossilised technology. I want to make the most of the environment and create opportunities for both ourselves and our children to enjoy living healthily and securely within it. I want to see and experience wildlife in all its forms and prefer talking about that to constantly asking people to stop doing things. I think that is a popular approach.Don't get me wrong. We all know that there are many things that human beings have to stop doing if we are to preserve the planet. We all know that some of the realities are difficult and expensive. What I am trying to argue for is not naive optimism. It is for greater use of the language and beliefs of optimism.The alt right has stolen the idea of political optimism. Distorted it, twisted it and turned it into something very unpleasant and dangerous. What we need now is an alt left with the ability to steal it back. That is not an easy thing to achieve but posing ourselves as the defenders of the old order and as people who are scared to try anything new and different is certainly not going to get us there. What we need instead is to borrow a bit of Obama's language and to couple it with some determined longstanding local, regional, national and international activism. Or in other words:"Yes we can."